Heritage Cirqa for schools
Never has the school resource centre/library been challenged by circumstances as it is now! Reductions in staffing, changing user behaviours, modes of access and increasing doubts amongst decision-makers about the place of the library in the 21st century, all feed the general sense of disquiet. In such a climate it is vital that a library resource management system is flexible enough to meet the needs of professionally qualified and unqualified library staff alike. It is also important that the system automates as much of the administrative process as possible to offset the reduced hours and staffing skills imposed on school libraries. It is also very helpful if the system can bring to play, vital statistics and information to support the case for the library as an ongoing essential resource for learning. Heritage Cirqa has the following three key attributes in abundance:
1. User-friendly – logically organised, simple and uncluttered screens. Functionality that is powerful but doesn’t get in the way when you don’t need it.
2. Flexible in approach – allowing commonly performed tasks to be scheduled to happen automatically
3. Affordable – sensibly priced (our schools pricing has barely changed in ten years) and available to purchase or subscribe to via different mechanisms.
4. Reports – available on just about anything you can think of (and things you might not too).
For more details about the specific functions and features of Heritage Cirqa, see our Feature List page.
Upgrades
One of the key differences between us and most other library resource system suppliers is that we include all software upgrades free of charge with our standard support agreement. This is a really important consideration when thinking about future running costs. Does your supplier, or those others you might be talking to offer this? We know that most don’t.
Hosting
Unquestionably, the best all round combination for schools is Heritage Cirqa is via our ‘Hosted’ service. We take care of all the system administration for you and apart from the peace of mind this brings in terms of
security and down time, it largely removes the need to involve your IT colleagues. See our hosting for schools page for more details.
We will help you to set up all of the background data for your system, including cataloguing conversions, sources for other resources and circulation rules for borrowing and reserving etc.
Did you know our upgrades are free of charge?
There are several ways to install and run Heritage Cirqa but for busy school librarians who might prefer to depend less on their IT colleagues and who would welcome the peace of mind from not having to look after backups and upgrades, then a hosted system might be the best choice for you?